In most mystery novels, the suspects outnumber the sleuths, but seemingly not in The Saint, the intriguingly intricate fourth title in Carin Gerhardsen's Stockholm-set Hammarby series. The book, translated from the Swedish by Paul Norlen, has a multigenerational ensemble cast of Hammarby cops who act like a superhero squad. Their superpower? Collaboration.
Published in Sweden in 2011, The Saint begins when a 13-year-old jogging in the Herräng forest discovers the body of her soccer coach, banker Sven-Gunnar Erlandsson; he was fatally shot in the neck, apparently while on his way home from a get-together with his four-man poker club. There's a rain-smeared note in his pocket, along with four playing cards with no fingerprints on them, indicating that someone besides Erlandsson put them there. Was he a card cheat who drove a fellow player to murder, or is something else afoot?
Gerhardsen lets her half dozen detectives take turns with the point-of-view reins, allowing readers to savor the cops' idiosyncrasies (one is a former rock star who appeared on Idol 2008) and appreciate their personal dramas carried over from previous Hammarby books. One inspector explains that the public-spirited Erlandsson organized "bicycle events": "You bicycle around the neighborhood and eat with each other to promote neighborhood harmony." As if in counterpoint to these very Swedish-sounding gatherings, the novel features a show of violence that's more tartan noir than Scandi noir. The Saint has some creaky phrasings, but the plotting is agile, and the title, which ends up having three meanings, is sublime. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer